aknitwit ([info]aknitwit) wrote,
@ 2008-11-18 14:32:00
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Grammar Rant II

This might not be the time for another grammar rant, with fires raging, kitties sick, and friends facing layoff--still, maybe an intellectual diversion is in order.
 
Looking at the Comments, it seems your pet peeves fall into several general categories:  Homonyms, word confusion, then/than, your/you're.

The homonyms (hoard/horde, rein/reign, tow/toe) and word confusions (don/dawn, tenet/tenant, tack/tact) are misused in context and are, to some degree, due to ignorance of spelling or definition.  There are no rules covering usage of these words, except LOOK IT UP!  Spell-checker will not catch it.  
The case with then/than is a little different.  Not only do these words look and sound similar, their definitions are close enough to be confusing.  In general, however, 'then' is temporal and 'than' is comparative.  When I was a kid, one was encouraged to say 'different from' instead of 'different than', but that prejudice is slowly disappearing.  In Ireland they say 'different to', which makes a lot of sense to me. 
Now for your/you're and its/it's, the confusion over the possessive and the contraction.  This irritates the hell out of me.  "Your welcome."  Grrrr.  'His' and 'hers' don't have apostrophes, so neither do 'yours' and 'its.'  This should be simple to remember.

One of my pet peeves is 'he and I' v. 'him and me'.  Some people, including news anchors, think it sounds ignorant to say "him and me."  But in this case it is correct:  It went badly for him and me.  A simple test for the correct choice is to drop one of the pronouns and see how it sounds.  It went badly for him.  You wouldn't say, "It went badly for he."  By the same token you would say, "He and I went to the mall," not "Him and I went to the mall."  Use the same test.  He went to the mall. 

Can I just say one more thing?  'None' is singular, so make sure the verb agrees.  "None was left standing."  The test for this is to mentally substitute 'not one' for 'none' and make the verb agree.
 
It should be obvious from this rant that I am not a Punctuation Nazi, and I have probably made many mistakes regarding the ' and the ".  Whatever.  I can only be perfect in a limited number of areas.     



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[info]jackkansas
2008-11-19 01:20 am UTC (link)
I'm one of those people who has difficulty with the "him-and-me" and "he-and-I" stuff. I usually try to finesse it by saying "us" and "we". B^)} Regarding "different from," I had the same grammar upbringing you did, although in my case it didn't take — "different than" is just fine by me. I get growly with folks who don't use "which/that" properly, but I think [info]palecur dealt with that definitively in the original post. I also think it's o.k. to split infinitives.

I am a punctuation Nazi and proud of it. I didn't critique your posting — as far as I can tell, you were inconsistent about using single and double quotes, but nothing reprehensible. B^)} Single quotes are often used to highlight words or phrases in linguistic studies; however, since some of what you were highlighting used apostrophes (easy to confuse with single quotes), I would have probably stuck with double quotes all around — hey, it's the Internet, who knows the difference!

My biggest bête noire about punctuation is the omission of the "serial comma." For extra credit —

Q: Is it o.k. to omit the serial comma if the sentence is otherwise unambiguous?
A: It is never o.k. to omit the serial comma because the reader than has to perform the mental exercise of deciding whether the sentence is ambiguous or not. Save everyone some work and put in the comma.

Learning English as a second language must be a nightmare. I was wondering the other day how one might explain why fur is spelled with only one r but purr is spelled with two.


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[info]aknitwit
2008-11-19 06:07 pm UTC (link)
1) I too found the which/that link very helpful. I loved the parentheses test.
2) I don't know that much about serial commas, but if you want to do a lesson, I will read it.
3) I am sooooo glad I am a native English-speaker. I cannot imagine learning a language with so many exceptions to every rule!

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Serial Commas
[info]jackkansas
2008-11-20 01:25 am UTC (link)
Consider this (correctly punctuated) sentence — "The colors of the flag are red, white, and blue." Now some people consider that it's o.k. to eliminate the comma before the conjunction, viz. — "The colors of the flag are red, white and blue." I don't see any positive reason to do this, but it works in this simple case. But when you have a more complicated sentence, it gets trickier — "Contestants' school colors are black and tan, blue and gold, and red and green." You can omit the serial comma in this example only if you assume that each school has two colors, which might not be the case. The larger problem is that omitting the serial comma forces the reader in each case to go through a logical exercise to determine the meaning of the sentence. The point of using punctuation is to make meaning abundantly clear, so the comma should be included.

A good example of the problem comes from my old Prentice-Hall Words into Type guide. Consider the sentence "Anna, May and Walter are here." Is the intent to tell Anna that May and Walter have arrived, or is it a statement that three people are present?

Unfortunately, even major publishing houses get this wrong. Robert Fisks's magnificent book on the Middle East, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (Random House, 2005) is marred by this blight. The tragedy is, omitting the comma introduces all kinds of ambiguities and makes the text more difficult to interpret, but gains you nothing. Rant, rant, rant!

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Re: Serial Commas
[info]aknitwit
2008-11-21 12:43 am UTC (link)
Ohhhh, yeah! That's what a serial comma is! Thanks for the clarification!

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